John Carpenter, the master of horror who directed Halloween, Village of the Damned, and Christine, among many more isn’t scared of much at this point. “I don’t get goose bumps much these days, I’m an old man,” he said recently. But there are still things that he is deathly disinterested—like his own films.

“They start and I think, Why did I do that? What was I thinking?” Carpenter told VF Hollywood. “Once they are done, they are out the door and I don’t want to think about them anymore.”

So Carpenter, it’s safe to say, won’t be viewing any of the films in the retrospective dedicated to him this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—even before he had to cancel a scheduled opening-night appearance due to illness.

Despite the director’s reticence with his own catalog, it’s an honor a long time coming for the master of genre films. As part of the retrospective, which runs from February 5 to 22, BAM will screen everything from Carpenter’s sci-fi works like Dark Star and Escape from L.A. to his horror features like Prince of Darkness, The Fog, The Thing, and The Ward, and the odd action flick such as Big Trouble in Little China.

In addition to the trip through Carpenter’s filmography, the BAM series is also featuring “Carpenter Selects,” a collection of films chosen by Carpenter that have somehow influenced him throughout the years, including the seminal sci-fi film Forbidden Planet: “I remind you I was eight years old, but I saw that movie and said to myself, ‘I’m going to become a movie director. I have to do this.’”

Carpenter eventually broke into the movie business with an eye on making westerns, but wound up, as he put it, typecast after the success of Halloween at age 30.

“That was fine with me, because I love horror movies and I love science-fiction movies,” he said.

Not that Carpenter’s journey to that eventual “master of horror” honorific has been easy, which might explain his reluctance to reflect on his past. “A lot of critics at the time told me that I did crap,” Carpenter said. “I had a movie released in 1982 called The Thing and both critics and audiences and especially the fans hated it. Hated it! There was a magazine article called ‘Is This the Most Hated Movie of All Time?’ Wow! Man, oh man.”

He added almost wistfully, “Every movie I’ve made has had a little dark cloud around it.”

Genre directors don’t have decades-long careers in Hollywood with thin skin, though. “You pick yourself up and you keep going,” Carpenter explained about coping with bad press. “You don’t dwell on it. It’s outside of my control and if I can’t control something, I don’t worry about it. But it wasn’t fun to go through. And whenever a movie is appreciated later, it soothes the wound.”

Carpenter is a master of horror, but on the film set, he’s a jack-of-all-trades. He’s a member of a cadre of Hollywood filmmakers who write, direct, and score their own films—including Halloween’s bone-chilling theme. (Charlie Chaplin and Robert Rodriguez are two other members.)

“It was out of necessity,” said Carpenter. “When you’re a student filmmaker and you’re making low-budget movies, you don’t have any money to hire a great composer or an orchestra to score the film. I knew if I had a synthesizer, I could do it myself.”

He composed the score to Dark Star, his first-ever film, which is included in the retrospective, and slowly made scoring part of his filmmaking process. “On Assault on Precinct 13 I had one day to do the music, but on Halloween I had three days. It was a big change!” said Carpenter. “While scoring started as a necessity, as I went on, it became part of my directing. It became a voice, a frame, for the movie. It’s very important.”

While Carpenter had always made music for fun, dabbling with his son in between rounds of video games, he had never put out an album until this year with Lost Themes, which came out recently on the Sacred Bones label. “Making an album was freeing,” said Carpenter. “There is no image to deal with, no pressure, no one standing over my shoulder criticizing, saying hurry up. It was fabulous.” Not that Carpenter could fully escape the visual: “It’s a score for the movies in your mind,” he explained about the album.

As for the retrospective, Carpenter has come around to the idea. “It’ll be fun,” he said, pausing a moment before adding, “As long as I don’t have to sit and watch my own movies.”